Blindside Grappling offers jiu-jitsu classes for all walks of life, run by owners and married couple Tyler Blind and Chelsy Leroy. From rugrats to golden years, everyone is welcome to learn this martial arts in a warm, family-friendly, inclusive environment. “We’ve got people at different levels of athleticism. We’ve got people at different stages of life.” Chelsy said.

Operating out of their home, the couple have transformed their basement into a full-blown martial arts studio. They enjoy the ease and comfort it brings to both them and their students. Their goal was to provide options to learn jiu-jitsu in Great Bend.

Classes start with a thorough warmup to get moving with the basic motions and fundamentals. Students get to work muscles that typically don’t get worked in typical everyday life. The goal is to drill the basic movements into muscle memory for all of the students. “So it’s kind of a sneaky way to get a muscle memory breakdown of all of our students,” Chelsy said. “We’re getting people moving and warming up, and they start learning those basics so much faster.”

Their goal is to offer a dedicated women’s self defense class alongside the jiu-jitsu classes that they are doing, and they plan to offer the defense classes to all teenage girls who wish to join their classes for free. Chelsy is passionate about teaching women’s self defense.

“When we originally opened, we were operating with mostly girls,” she said. “So we were kind of exclusively doing women’s self defense and women’s jiu-jitsu.”

“I’ve always wanted to get into martial arts and I didn’t even know jiu-jitsu existed,” Chelsy said of her journey into martial arts. “I always wanted to be able to learn martial arts and be able to kind of do something in defense, but I also just wanted to better myself.”

Chelsy discovered a jiu-jitsu class in the Great Bend area, which is where she met Tyler, who was one of the coaches at the time.

After two years, Chelsy fell out of jiu-jitsu, and Tyler never gave up on her martial arts training. “He was the one that kept reaching out,” Chelsy said. “We started dating before I came back, and that was kind of what got me back into it.”

Tyler started his martial arts journey when he was 19 years old. “I learned a lot of fighting off my back. So I had to naturally learn jiu-jitsu to survive in the room with my teammates,” Tyler said. He eventually had to stop fighting due to a back injury, but when he went back to college in his late 20s, he discovered a jiu-jitsu class and joined. “I loved when I did it doing MMA. I just wanted to get hit in the head a lot less.”

Tyler had been doing jiu-jitsu for eight years by the time they opened Blindside Grappling. “I see a lot of gyms and I knew the atmosphere, kind of like what I want to do on my own, just different.” he said.

They got married and made the move to open a gym in their own home. Blindside Grappling has been going strong for a year and a half, and those of all skill levels and athletic abilities are welcomed and encouraged to join.

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